Novelist, born in New York City, USA. He studied at Columbia University, wrote radio scripts, and served in the US Navy in the South Pacific in World War 2. He drew on this experience for his classic war novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951, Pulitzer), which became a successful play and film. Other books include Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1962), Inside, Outside (1985), and The Glory (1994). His two-volume historical novel, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1975), led to popular television serials. The Will to Live On: The Resurgence of Jewish Heritage appeared in 2000.
Herman Wouk (born May 27, 1915) is a bestselling American author with a number of notable novels to his credit, including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.
Herman Wouk was born in New York City into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia.
Wouk joined the United States Navy and served in the Pacific Theater, an experience he later characterized as educational; Wouk served as an officer aboard two destroyer minesweepers (DMS), the USS Zane and USS Southard, becoming executive officer of the latter. His second novel, City Boy, proved to be a commercial disappointment at the time of its initial publication perhaps, as Wouk once claimed, it was swept away by the excitement over Norman Mailer's bestselling World War II novel The Naked and the Dead (1948).
While writing his next novel Wouk read each chapter as it was completed to his wife, who remarked at one point that if they didn't like this one, he'd better take up another line of work (a line he would give to the character of the editor Jeannie Fry in his 1962 novel Youngblood Hawke). The novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), would win the Pulitzer Prize. A huge best-seller drawing from his wartime experiences aboard minesweepers during World War II, The Caine Mutiny was adapted by the author into a Broadway play called The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and was later made into a film, with Humphrey Bogart portraying Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg, captain of the fictional DMS Caine. Some Navy personnel complained at the time that Wouk had taken every twitch of every commanding officer in the Navy and put them all into one character, but Captain Queeg has endured as one of the great characters in American fiction. His novels after The Caine Mutiny include Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1962), and Don't Stop the Carnival (1965). In the 1970s, Wouk published his two most ambitious novels, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978).
Wouk hired highly-qualified young historians to assist him with the research for his later historical novels, and their details are highly accurate. Experts have described The Caine Mutiny as one of the best depictions of daily life aboard a US ship during the Second World War.
In 1998, Wouk received the Guardian of Zion Award.
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